Five Alumni Named 2023-24 Donaldson Fellows

The Yale School of Management has named five alumni as Donaldson Fellows for 2023-24, recognizing them as embodying the school’s mission to educate leaders for business and society in their personal and professional accomplishments.

The newly named Donaldson Fellows are:

• David Browning ’99, Founder and CEO, Enveritas
• Dr. Marian Chertow ’81, PhD ’00, Professor of Industrial Environmental Management & Director, Center for Industrial Ecology, Yale School of the Environment
• Linda Mason ’80, Chair and Founder, Bright Horizons
• Martine Singer ’89, President and CEO, Children’s Institute
• Chin Hwee Tan ’03, Chairman, EMA and SGTRADEX

Donaldson Fellows are selected from among alumni nominated by members of the Yale SOM community. The selection committee includes alumni, students, faculty, former Donaldson Fellows, and members of the school’s leadership team.

The Donaldson Fellows Program is named for William H. Donaldson, Yale SOM’s founding dean, himself a leader with a lasting impact in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors.

Biographies

David Browning ’99 is CEO of Enveritas, a nonprofit organization, that provides sustainability assurance for the coffee industry (assessing issues such as deforestation and slavery). Browning previously led TechnoServe’s global coffee practice for 13 years. During this time his work increased incomes for hundreds of thousands of smallholder coffee farmers in East Africa and Latin America. He has served as a trusted counselor for many of the world’s leading coffee companies on sustainability, and his work was selected for study by global leaders at the World Economic Forum. Browning’s teams have created innovations that have transformed smallholder coffee at scale, including wastewater treatment, more environmentally sustainable processing, more effective agricultural extension, sustainability verification, and the world’s most accurate deforestation detection model using machine learning. Browning formerly worked for McKinsey & Company and holds an MBA from Yale and a master’s degree in advanced finance from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Dr. Marian Chertow ’81 is professor of industrial environmental management and director of the Center for Industrial Ecology at the Yale School of the Environment. Her research and teaching focus on industrial ecology, business/environment issues, circular economy, and waste management. Her best-known research explores the study of industrial symbiosis, which involves geographically based exchanges of materials, energy, water, and wastes within networks of businesses globally. She is a frequent international lecturer and served on the Council of Canadian Academies Expert Panel on Circular Economy. Previously, Professor Chertow spent 10 years in environmental business and state and local government.

Linda Mason ’80 is co-founder and retired president and chair of Bright Horizons Family Solutions, taking it from a startup in her home, raising financing, building the organization, and taking it public. The company, now a $5 billion public company, is the largest worldwide provider of worksite child care, early education, and education advising, operating 1,200 childcare centers and employing 30,000 people.

Mason also co-founded Horizons for Homeless Children (HHC), a Boston-based organization that serves the needs of homeless children and their parents. HHC operates a large childcare center for the homeless in Roxbury serving 175 children and their parents. In addition, HHC has trained more than15,000 volunteers to work in 150 play spaces established by HHC in homeless shelters.  

Mason recently stepped down as long-term chair of Mercy Corps. Mercy Corps is a $500 million international relief and development agency headquartered in the U.S. Mercy Corps operates in 43 countries serving 17 million people, with major programs in some of the most difficult environments in the world, including Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, and Congo, among others.

Earlier in her career, Mason managed large-scale refugee relief operations overseas. She served as co-country director of Save the Children’s emergency program in Sudan during the African famine of the mid-80s, creating a national program that served 400,000 Sudanese famine victims. She also was responsible for the operation of emergency services for two refugee camps serving more than 40,000 Eritrean refugees. Mason also directed a large feeding program for malnourished children in Cambodian refugee camps along the Thai border after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia of 1979.  

Mason is chair of The Boston Foundation, a $1.7 billion foundation. She served as leader-in-residence at the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School from 2014 to 2016. She has a B.A. from Cornell University and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. She also serves on the boards of the Packard Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and MASS MoCA.

Martine Singer ’89 is president and CEO of Children’s Institute (CII) in Los Angeles, leading one of the city’s key social impact organizations with a budget of more than $100 million and a staff of 1,000. CII, under her guidance, actively dismantles barriers imposed by discrimination and poverty, offering educational programs, counseling, and parenting support. Their work is critical in paving pathways to economic mobility for the communities they serve.

Singer was previously the president and CEO of Para Los Niños, where she continued her lifelong commitment to child welfare and education. She held executive positions in global media, launching the first foreign-language edition of the New York Times and the award-winning online version of the Los Angeles Times in 1993.

A native New Yorker, Singer holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. She serves on the boards of the California Behavioral Health Association, Eisner Health and Wise Readers to Leaders and is a member of the CNBC CEO Council, marking her as a thought leader in both the nonprofit and business sectors. In 2023 she received the Frances Riker Davis award for public service from The Brearley School and was nominated for Nonprofit Executive of the Year by the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Chin Hwee Tan ’03 is a Singaporean and father of three. He currently serves as chairman of the Energy Supply Resilience Advisory Panel with the Energy Market Authority (EMA) to look at energy policies on strengthening the resilience of Singapore’s energy system. He is also chairman of SGTraDex, a private and public partnership across different governmental ministries and agencies with the task of digitalization Singapore’s supply chain with the world. He has previously worked as founding partner for Apollo Global Management in Asia Pacific and for Trafigura. Between 2016 and 2023, Tan served as the Asia-Pacific and Middle East CEO of Trafigura, a Global Fortune 500 company. He was the first Asian to hold this position. Trafigura was the largest among the only three Singapore companies to appear in the Fortune Global 500 list, and it ranked top 12 globally in 2023.

Tan received the Distinguished Financial Industry Certified Professional Award from the Singapore government in 2013. In 2014, he was honored as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and World Cities Summit Young Leader and received the Nanyang Alumni Award from Nanyang Technological University, his alma mater. In 2015, he received the World Outstanding Young Chinese Entrepreneurs Award from business newspaper Yazhou Zhoukan and the World Federation of Chinese Entrepreneurs Organization. He was also voted by the Hedge Fund Journal as the emerging top 40 absolute return investors globally and recognized by The Asset for managing the Best Asia Credit Hedge Fund.

He earned an MBA in 2003 from the Yale School of Management, where he was T.A. for finance and R.A. for four professors and captained the cross-country team. He also completed a postgraduate course at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2011. He is a chartered financial analyst and a certified public accountant in Singapore and Australia. He graduated in 1995 with a bachelor of accountancy from Nanyang Technological University (NTU). During his days at NTU, he was the president of the university’s Mensa club and the president of the university’s Photovideographic Society.  

Tan has sat on the boards of various organizations in the public and private sectors. The positions he held include: member of the Resource Panel for Government Parliamentary Committee for Finance and Trade and Industry, member of the Advisory Panel for Youth Corps Singapore; member of the Advisory Panel for the Ministry of Education; member of the Advisory Panel for the Ministry of Culture, Community, and Youth; member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Finance Centre Advisory Panel; and member of the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore”s International Maritime Centre 2030 Advisory Committee. Tan has been an Academy Member of the Global Teacher Prize since inception 2013 and is involved as a judge to give out the $1 million Nobel teaching prize.

Tan and Thomas R. Robinson, the president and CEO of AACSB International, co-wrote Asian Financial Statement Analysis: Detecting Financial Irregularities, which was published in April 2014 by Wiley. The Chinese version of the book was launched in Shanghai in 2015, and copies were sold out upon release. In December 2020, Tan published his second book, Values at the Core, co-authored with Thomas Grandjean, which explores the role of human values in making societies prosperous and went on to be listed as one of the Financial Times readers’ Best 2021 Summer Books.

Tan was an adjunct professor at Nanyang Technological University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Singapore Management University. He also took on the International Olympic Committee financial advisor role from March 2016 to December 2019. Tan is actively involved in social work since his university days. One of his social initiatives was setting up the Premies Fund with the KK Women’s and Children's Hospital to help parents with premature babies cope with the financial burden.